How are OpenClassrooms diplomas validated?

I often receive questions about how we validate our students’ skills at OpenClassrooms. For those who aren’t used to our online training process, there might be reasons to be skeptical:

• What proves that a student actually took the courses?
• What proves that a student didn’t cheat for their exams?
• And even, what proves that it was actually the right person who answered the questions rather than a friend?

For some people, nothing can be safer than an exam room (like for high school tests): a supervisor circulates the room, cell phones are prohibited, and calculators can’t be too powerful. Incidentally, it is worth noting that this has never actually truly avoided cheating (students can be very creative!).

Spoiler alert: cheating exists everywhere, including at OpenClassrooms. But over the years, we have developed a strong system that I’ll detail below.

------------------

Project-based coursework

We opted for continuous assessment only, rather than include a huge final exam. It seemed much better fitting.

It is important to mention that all our certifying paths are based on projects – there are about ten of them?– that students must complete. Many courses are available to help them do so, but reading them is not mandatory.?

That was actually one of the most counterintuitive and most important decisions that I had to make. Reading courses doesn’t prove anything, whereas completing a project proves that you truly can use the required skills.?

The multiple levels of validation

The full validation process involves several steps. Each one corresponds to an additional level:

1. Students have weekly video calls with their mentors. Mentors are experts in their fields. They monitor the students’ progress on their projects, provide advice and support. They take notes about the progress, warn us when a student is at risk of giving up. When a mentor considers that a project is finished, they leave the floor to an assessor, another expert randomly chosen.
2. Assessors question the students about their projects during a live video call. The call is recorded and added to the student’s file.
3. Students are requested to explain how they carried out their projects, they are asked questions to check that they have a full understanding of their project. It often takes the form of role-playing.
4. If an assessor finds that a student hasn’t fully acquired the skills, they invite them to improve their project. This happens to most students and is absolutely not considered a failure.
5. Once a project is validated, students carry on with the following one with their mentors’ support. Steps 1 and 2 are thus repeated until all projects are validated.
6. At the same time, other assessors are randomly invited to watch the recording of project assessments and give their opinion: would they have validated that project or not? They don’t know what the other assessor decided, which allows us to identify deviations.?
7. At any time, if fraud is suspected, we can be notified through a whistleblowing process. Most of the time, we investigate suspicions of plagiarism (which are not always proven).
8. It’s not over yet! Once all projects have been validated, students’ files are handed to the diploma jury. The jury comprises field experts, recruiters, a representative of OpenClassrooms’s academic team, and a mentor. The jury studies the provided documents:?mentors’ weekly notes regarding the students’ progress, the documents and projects made by the students and the recording of assessment sessions.
9. If the jury delivers a positive verdict, the student is awarded their diploma. Phew!
10. In case of any doubt, the jury will ask the student to complete an additional project and to meet with them if necessary. This happens quite rarely (less than 5% of cases on average) as the continuous assessment process is quite strict, but it sometimes happens.

OpenClassrooms’s multi-level evaluation process

A strong system… that cannot be 100% perfect

As you can see, OpenClassrooms’s multi-level validation process is quite unique. It is strict and exacting. I might be biased as I contributed to its implementation but I sincerely think so: there are multiple safeguards throughout the process.?

The jury can review the student's file with the uploaded documents and all the live project defense videos

Is the system perfect? No. Besides, we regularly receive notifications through our whistleblowing system regarding students who would have plagiarized other students’ projects. These are sometimes false alerts, but there are some true cases that lead us to intervene. However, I consider this to be proof that the system functions —one cannot prevent cheating attempts but one can find them out.

All these verifications have a cost that we willingly take on because it seems the right thing to do. We are going to keep improving our system over time, especially the random double-blind analysis of assessment sessions between assessors that has just started this year!

What about you: what do you think makes a good evaluation system?

Thanks to Karine Le Moigne for her help in translating this post